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President Pranab Mukherjee's son Abhijit and Mamata Banerjee's bete noire Deepa Dasmunshi will be among 78 candidates slugging it out in six Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal going to polls in the second phase on April 24, campaigning for which came to an end today.
While five of these six seats -- Raiganj, Maldaha Uttar, Maldaha Dakshin, Jangipur and Murshidabad -- were won by the Congress in 2009 general elections, which it fought in alliance with TMC in West Bengal, the Balurghat seat was won by RSP.
In a bid to retain all these five seats, which are Congress strongholds, the party had got its top leadership to campaign there.
While Congress president Sonia Gandhi addressed two rallies at Islampur in Raiganj constituency and at Suti in Jangipur today, party vice president Rahul Gandhi addressed public meetings at Malda and Baharampur on April 19.
TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee, in a bid to wrest these seats from the erstwhile ally and the one held by RSP, has extensively campaigned in the four districts addressing rallies in all these constituencies.
Out of the 42 Lok Sabha constituencies in West Bengal, Jangipur and Raiganj are two of the most watched seats with Abhijit and Deepa fighting to retain the respective seats as Congress candidates.
Abhijit had won the Jangipur seat by a slender margin of 2,536 votes in a 2012 by-election when his father Pranab Mukherjee vacated the seat to take over as the President of India.
Banerjee, who had not put up any candidate against Abhijit in 2012, has vowed at a Jangipur rally in support of her party candidate Sk Nurul Islam, not to leave an inch to any opposition candidate in any seat.
With the CPI(M) having renominated Muzaffar Hossain, who had finished second in 2012, and the BJP's Samrat Ghosh apart from some smaller parties like WPI, SDP and SUCI which have a small but committed share of votes, it is set to be an interesting multi-cornered contest.
At Raiganj constituency in North Dinajpur district, Union Minister of State for Urban Development Deepa Dasmunshi is pitted against TMC's Pabitra Ranjan Dasmunshi and CPI(M)'s heavyweight candidate Md Salim, who has shifted from Kolkata (North), where he lost in 2009, to this North Bengal seat this time.
